


A Coward

by NukeLassic



Category: The Property of Hate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-07
Updated: 2019-08-07
Packaged: 2020-08-11 13:10:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20154148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NukeLassic/pseuds/NukeLassic
Summary: The process by which one thing is made into another is rarely one that comes without cost. As I'm sure any smith could tell you, to temper metal one must first melt it. The process by which one makes heroes is hardly so gentle.





	A Coward

For some, an identity is like a favorite childhood toy. An object of importance, but one whose immediate relevance has been eroded by life and circumstances. A misplaced thought here, and errant need there, and as the months roll ever onward, the thoughts of the toy are eaten by the absentminded hungers of the world.

For others, identity is a closely guarded secret. It is clung to, furiously defended, and something that is as inextricable as one’s thoughts, one’s hopes, one’s dreams. While one’s self is never as immutable as one hopes—only indelible enough to remain oneself despite the losses—there is a level of personhood that exists inextricable from the person. Nothing so discardable as names or titles, but something terribly important. Something, that if taken, will leave any person in to jagged, violent pieces shaped like something else. The shadow of a life, the fury forged when that life is stolen. The world eats these too.

Voracious are the teeth that follow Her gaze.

The crystalline forest was one of the safer places in this world. Dark, shadowed alcoves of long strings of trees promised safety from the eyes and ears around. One did not dare speak too loudly, think too visibly, in places where She could see. Anyone with sense knew that though the instinctive fear of darkness was a wise fear to heed, it was perhaps the wisest fear to follow if it meant disappearing into those shadows.

The smartest cowardice is always the safest.

Always.

We trudged for hours. I could feel him struggling to make sense of this land. To unspool the beliefs he had, and rewind them into something resembling the shapes he’d seen before. To reprogram the reality to his mind, rather than the much more sensible option of reprogramming his mind to suit the reality. Really, was it truly so hard for him to have a good idea?

“Do you intend to tarry so ceaselessly at the edge of my vision, or do you intend to walk with the measure of discipline of which I know you’re capable?”

He glowered at me, planting his feet. I heard the wood clomp as he took his stance. “The more you talk in riddles, the more angry it makes me. You won’t give me a straight answer about anything, and I don’t know where we’re going, and you’re just over there pretending like _I_ am the one doing something wrong.”

“Given that the right thing to do right now isn’t lingering at length in an old forest while we’re on our way to the correct way to go, you are doing something wrong.” I turned, and thrust my cane across the distance between us. I heard it bounce off of him, which produced a grunt of surprise, a clatter as it fell to the floor, and then I heard him bend over to retrieve it. So I snapped, and his shoes began scraping the ground as he slid over to me. His chest collided into my hand, where I snatched the cane back, impatiently, and kept walking. “Now keep up.”

He made a noise of hardly concealed anger, but kept walking. Nothing but the sound of our wooden shoes followed for the next few minutes.

One lesson I hadn’t yet learned, in those days, was that when the essence of a person is taken from them, their impulses are all that remained. A person prone to impatience, sullen anger, and scarcely restrained violence doesn’t lose those things if they are broken. It just becomes the loudest parts of them that are left. If you shatter a window, it does not become anything else. Each of those shards is still the thickened panes of glass, they are just disconnected.

The largest, most jagged piece is still primarily sharp, tempered glass.

After a few moments more, I turned into the darkness, slowing my pace, and listened. I heard nothing, which alarmed me. So I listened harder, and continued to hear nothing. The silence filled the space in the way a pair of wooden shoes never could.

“Ah…”

I turned and ran back through the forest. Footsteps clopped loudly against the trees, the edges of the ocean above, the crystals that formed in the unkempt overgrowth of these trees and their omnipresent darkness. My fingers found my audio dial, and though I felt profoundly absurd in so doing, I shouted into the darkness. “Now’s no time to get lost on me, chap! Where’ve you gone?”

Arguments, I find, have a way of spiraling into so much more than just their surface subjects. One does not argue with a loved over just over the dishes, or just over an unkempt living room. Those are certainly catalysts for disagreement, but the true fires that burn under and argument come from deep places. The wounds that come from such arguments rarely feature the barbs and blades of a messy kitchen or misplaced mail, and more often form into scars that haunt those involved long after the fighting has stopped.

I ran in the darkness for an hour, hoping that my ward hadn’t gotten found and taken in the darkness, but it would seem that luck was not on my side. Blast it. To hunt for another hero would take yet more time, and this world’s hours were ceaselessly sliding toward oblivion. And, like so many that came before, more inane questions, more foolishness, more curiosity, and more of this. More lurking in the dark. More dodging the eyes I could feel on me even as I cowered in the dark.

What a dreadful turn of events. I’d had some hope for this one.

Undoubtedly, She had found him. I shook the face from my mind, it was less real than the one he would become. The pieces that this one leaves in this world would no doubt be explosively angry. I did not look forward to finding them again, or have them find me.

While I was off tempting another soul into my service, She was setting Her barbs into the previous. The process by which She unmakes men was something I hardly dared think on, and often something one spared little mental time toward. Down that road was only madness, hatred, violence. His fate was unthinkable, which was precisely why I buried any thoughts toward it in my mind, and didn’t think on it. Nothing productive could come from those thoughts.

A grim, judgmental voice somewhere deep within my casing voiced a simple phrase that echoed in my mind: What a cowardly way out of it.

I shook my thoughts away, and traveled outward. The clouds would lead me to another hero, and perhaps this process could become smarter, safer, less prone to capture. All of the others, it seems, were not so indelible as to have their selves stripped away in both body and soul. Good enough lot, most of them, but hardly the Stuff heroes were made of.

I reached into my jacket, gripped the key carefully, and turned the lock.

Once more into the breach. Once more to lead someone to their inevitable capture. Once more I could say the words that promised a whimsy fate would cruelly deliver.

“...I say. Would you like to be a hero?”


End file.
